Schizoid Sensations

Lilith, in ancient Babylonian mythology, was a female embodiment of evil. In J. R. Salamanca's gaudy, gothic 1961 novel she was a wildly desirable schizophrenic whose corruptive beauty disrupted the routine of a private sanitarium. In Director Robert Rossen's movie version of the book, she is Jean Seberg, who enjoys an unholy liaison with a young therapist-in-training, lures an inmate toward destruction, steals away with a lesbian patient, and occasionally whispers improprieties into the ears of small boys.

Director Rossen renders all this with just enough art-film panache to have won Lilith a place among far worthier movies in the recent New York Film Festival. Certainly, the techniques of modern moviemaking are much in evidence. Sound and images overlap. During long silent passages, the characters narrow their eyes at one another, conveying reams of censorable prose in each perfervid glance. The photography is often eerily beautiful--a subaqueous twilight world where everyone's torment finally condenses into eddying streams, stagnant pools and rushing rapids, an unsettling suggestion that the machinery of despair is water-driven.

On the wall of her room, Lilith scrawls hiara pirlu resh kavawn, a phrase from a secret language she has devised. It is never translated. By contrast, the lush spoken dialogue works little strain on the imagination. Lilith wants "to leave the mark of her desire on every living creature in the world." Warren Beatty, studiously guttural as the overzealous therapist who notes that his patient looks just like his mother, has difficulty explaining his dilemma to the chief psychiatrist. "Do you think she's trying to seduce you?" asks the doctor. "Um . . . you can't put it like that," mumbles Warren. The doctor puts it another way: "It isn't unknown for patients to seduce personnel, and vice versa." And he gamely adds, "I think all of us here are concerned with rapture in some way." That may be. But it does seem silly to deliver the same old Hollywood sexology in a fancy wrapper marked resh kavawn.

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